SWTOR Unleashed (game files in RAM to improve performance)

I disagree.

My desktop was recently fried by a 9 year old with wielding a fateful cup of juice.

While I'm collecting parts to rebuild it, I've been stuck playing on my old crappy i3 laptop with 4GB of RAM, integrated video, and the standard garbage laptop HDD. Needless to say, the performance was quite awful. The game is playable at the lowest settings outside of the fleet, WZs, or any other high population areas. Inside those areas, or even in a FP it is too hard to maneuver getting 5ish or less FPS, with spikes up to 8 or so.

Just for funzies I tried unleashed on the laptop and had a HUGE improvement. I can't remember the config used off the top of my head, but it only took up around 750MB or so. If it took up over 1GB, the launcher would either throw an error or get stuck at the "initializing" step.

In fleet it now gets 21ish FPS with dips down to 10 occasionally. The NPCs and vendors no longer take 1+ minutes to load and I no longer have to watch my toon zoom around in an awkward sitting position while the speeder loads 3 min later. FP are also now playable without too much FPS lag. WZ are still out of the question but world PVP isn't an automatic death sentence anymore.

So with only 4GB of RAM, the game went from barely playable to totally playable with very little RAM set aside for the RAMdisk. Its not like I can crank up the settings now, but at least I can play. It may not make a huge difference to a decked out gaming rig, but it really had a huge impact on the crappy little laptop.

I'm a little surprised at how much of the performance bottleneck is due to the HDD. This game must have a ton of r/w cycles. I really didn't have any expectation that this would help considering the specs I had to work with.

Hi, Ken,

That's pretty amazing - I'm glad you had such a good experience. I think the quality of your experience is intimately tied to which files you chose to place on the RAM drive. If you could post the exact objects you selected, I'll bet that would help a lot of people.

All Unleashed does in effect is manually keep some files in RAM at all times. This is like telling the operating system "please always cache these files." It works on the assumption that the default caching strategy in the OS isn't smart enough to cache the right files - it's like giving a "hint" to Windows that some files are more important than others.

However, you're also reserving portions of memory that the operating system would otherwise have available for caching. Thus, if you have a memory constrained system and you use Unleashed to cache the WRONG files (such as planets you rarely visit), then you'll reduce the OSes cache, there'll be even more thrashing, and you'll drastically reduce performance.

BTW, I'm fairly confident in saying that SWTOR is by far the most memory intensive MMO - it's all those cutscenes and full voiceovers. Those have to be read from the disk into memory and thus into cache, which will squeeze out other, most likely more important data from that cache. I wonder how much more peppy the game would be if you could turn off all voiceovers (just use subtitles) and skip all cutscenes. That might go a long way...

In other words, the less memory you have, the more important it is to cache the RIGHT files, whatever they may be. The disparity between the relative speed of a crappy 5400rpm hard drive and even slow DDR2 makes the correct file selection crucial.

Any chance you could resurcet that list of objects you chose to store on the RAM disk?

Its telling you the problem. Either free some ram (the only way to do this is add ram to your comp pretty much) or you have too many assets checked off to put into your free ram area. Youll have to uncheck some of them.

I have a pretty good system that is configured only for gaming... In normal low population parts of the fleet I get max FPS of 111-112... But when I go into high pops it can drop as low as 30FPS... The same when in pvp... But not always... Why do some pvp matches in the same maps, drop to 30FPS, But other times it doesn't
I am wondering if I will see much of a difference trying this program... I basically want to smooth out pvp
This is my current set up
Intel i7 4770k @ 4.2, corsair H100 cooler
Asus WS z87 MB
3x intel 520 SSDs, I run Win 7 64 on one, Swtor on another, and pagefile on the 3rd
G.Skill Trident 2666 8GB... I plan on installing another 8GB this week
Sapphire HD7970 VaporX 6GB
ENERMAX gold standard 1250w PSU
The system is optimised for gaming... I have all non essential services and back ground apps off... I have a fast, stable internet connection
Will I see a noticeable difference... ??

Has anyone used the Asus ROG RamDisk utility. I'm thinking of trying it.

probably a little bit, but with those SSDs probably not much at all. If you are getting more memory for games, probably not worth it right now unless you multi-tasking quite a bit.

Anyone tried running this with SoR? I came up with a "C6 error" asking if I had 2gb of memory spare (or something_) and dumped me from the loading screen to desktop.

It seems this is causing my game to not display the animations for new skills. A repair and running in retail mode from now on might help

SO... in looking into it, Asus ROG RamDisk is basically useless for SWTOR as you can only load FULL directories not individual files. SO maybe I'll try SWTOR Unleashed sometime.

Has anyone figured out how to get it to work with SoR? Really missing this :/